One of my COVID discoveries was my great-grandmother's photo albums. The family legend was that she was the nasty woman who disowned her daughter for dating a goy; the real problem was she died, and then my grandfather's father died, and then my mother was born, and then WWII started, leaving my Jewish grandmother in an antisemitic hive with an estranged father, a brother at war and two young children. So she let my grandfather gaslight the kids into thinking it was the Jews who were racist.

I'm a quarter Belarusian Jew. My mother is half Belarusian Jew. And a dead ringer for her grandmother; the resemblance is uncanny.

There are, of course, very few Belarusian Jews left. They were expelled, exterminated or otherwise invited to leave; based on the documents my crew bailed on The Pale about 20 years prior to the (fictional) events of Fiddler on the Roof. My grandmother died 30 years ago. I wish I could have asked about... so many things. What I know is the gaslighting is so severe that my family simultaneously argues for my great-great grandfather's Judaism while simultaneously insisting he paid someone else for their name so that he could escape military service and emigrate. When I pointed out that military service at the time was mostly about exterminating jews, not putting them in uniform, I was met with stony silence.

What I have? Is a proud history of Americans who ended up in Texas when they assed out of their Alabama plantation when their slaves were emancipated. A proud history of Americans who ended up in Boston when they were assed out of their New York manner home when their slaves were emancipated.

I found out the other day that the Muscovite wife of a friend of mine went to college there because their degree program was better than Kiev's. That's as close as I have to a connection with Ukraine. Other than a family history that's nothing but photographs, letters, and a pieced-together history against everything I ever grew up with.

But I know there were a handful of these in amongst the christmas decorations, my mother had no idea where they came from, and they all got thrown away before I turned ten.